Because I Can't Stop Talking about Books and Politics

Reading Roundup

The Gap of Time, Jeannette Winterson (quote) — Very moving retelling of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. If I have a complaint, it is that it felt too short. Some of the ideas in the second half of the book didn’t quite have time to breathe. Still highly recommended.

The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro — Oh, Kazuo Ishiguro, how you try my patience! I was the world’s greatest Ishiguro fan for years. Read everything he wrote. Multiple times. Swore I would find his grocery lists interesting. Then came Nocturnes, a collection of five novellas which I have read twice and just cannot enjoy. But everyone is entitled to an off day, right? Still, I was nervous enough that I put off reading The Buried Giant for a year. A year. That is a lot for someone with no impulse control. And I am sad to report that my fears were justified: The Buried Giant just didn’t work for me. I found it slow and overwritten. How could the man who gave us The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go produce this? Total disappointment. (Having said that, I might wait a year or two and then give it another go. Sometimes a book is just bad for a particular time in your life, not bad per se. Of course, that is what I said about Nocturnes.)

Saint Mazie, Jami Attenberg — I really enjoyed this book, although for some reason discovering at the very end that Mazie was based on a real person dampened my enthusiasm a bit. But I really did enjoy the time I spent in Mazie’s company: she was a charming companion even when she faced heartbreak. Pete Sorenson (the character who, in the novel, finds her diary) says, “I just wanted it to go on and on. I wanted her to live forever.” Me too, Pete.

The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker — I was really excited about this one, despite waiting five years after purchasing it to actually read it. As it turns out, though, I am just not that interested in linguistics. Good to know, I guess. I am pretty sure this is my problem, not Steven Pinker’s — the book is well-written and he does a good job of clearly explaining the technical jargon that inevitably comes up in a book like this. And to be fair, the chapters on naming and swearing did hold my attention. (I’ll be scheduling a therapy session to figure out why, exactly, those were the only two topics that caught my interest.)

Also, that is one super-ugly cover.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway — I first read this for my very favorite college class, a history seminar on American expatriates in Paris. It was my introduction to Hemingway, except for a couple of short stories in high school, and I really loved the way that he wrote. I still do, although I really wrestle with his sexism. I think he writes women terribly, and I don’t think Brett Ashley holds up particularly well. I still think his best book is A Moveable Feast, which purports to be a memoir but is really just about as fictional as any of his novels.